Printing on edible items such as snacks can provide an added level of excitement beyond the snacking itself. The printed content can be in the form of graphics, text or combinations, and it can be used to deliver, for example, games, stories, jokes, and educational facts. This new level of excitement is, however, a function of how new the printed content is to the consumer. Such is the case, for example, of reading a joke for the second time. In this case the joke may not be effective any longer at creating an impact or sustaining the interest. Also, when being exposed to an image for the second time, a consumer may no longer be interested in it because she is already familiar with it. To sustain a high level of excitement upon consumption of printed edible items it is, therefore, important, to provide consumers with variety of content within a unit purchase and over multiple purchases.
This could be accomplished by a very large database of content from which to draw for printing. But this could be difficult to manage since all content would typically need to be reviewed and approved for use, and a system to store all content could be more complex. For example, stacked fabricated potato crisps like Pringles®, are a popular snack item sold as stacks of crisps within canisters, that lend themselves well for printing for having consistent planar surfaces that can be printed. However, billions of individual Pringle® crisps are sold every year. It would be very difficult to provide a database with printed content that would be unique for this many snack crisps, in order to provide consumers new printed content in every canister purchase. Furthermore, the licensing fees of images provided by content providers could potentially be much higher as a result of needing to use more varied content.
It would be, therefore, advantageous to devise methods to deliver new printed content consistently to consumers with every unit purchase. Furthermore, it would be advantageous to do so while minimizing the number of images used in the process.